Big Sky Blues

By Robert Sims Reid

Even in a small town, street rules apply. That means you handcuff everybody. Even the dead and dying. When two cops spend hour after hour together on the street, policing the bleak hours between midnight and dawn of a Montana winter, they live by street rules. They also get to know things about
each other. Sometimes, they know more about th

• Language: English
• Publisher: West 26th street Press
• Release date: Jan 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9780786754250

Book preview

Prologue

When things turn to shit, there is a place where Ray Bartell likes to go, a place with lakes. Three of them. Graver, Tamarack, and Little Sleeping Child. These are Montana lakes, way the hell and gone in the mountains on the other side of Bride’s Canyon northeast of Rozette, which is the town where Bartell lives. It should be easy to get to these lakes, except that it isn’t, since they lay high in the lap between four peaks, miles from the nearest road. But when you are just about asleep, or just about awake, you can almost feel the sharp breeze blowing off the water, roll in the scent that is just the right blend of coniferous trees, trout, and pure air.

You can see the lakes from a gnarled, igneous outcropping above the Bride’s Canyon and Burnt Milk divide. Sit there and let your feet dangle below the rock in sheer air while you catch your breath after the long climb up Bride’s, so long it’s usually night when you get back home to Helen and Jess. Helen is Bartell’s wife. Jess is their twelve-year-old daughter. Helen and Jess never go along when he hikes the canyon. That’s because they fight a lot and all the shouting gets on Bartell’s nerves. Well, they did go with him once a few years ago, and he threatened to throw the both of them off a cliff. The three of them make a joke of it now. The time Dad lost his marbles. But Helen and Jess haven’t asked to come along since.

The divide itself is a sparse saddle off to your left as you look down into the Burnt Milk country. The saddle is always thick with elk sign, tracks and turds both cold and fresh. Sometimes you get so close to the elk you can smell them, that damp fecund musky smell that’s not like anything else. You can smell it even above the sting of sage and juniper. Bartell hunted the saddle once, raised the crosshairs of his 7mm. Sauer right square on the neck of a spike bull as the bull, really whipped, stumbled across into Burnt Milk on the run from a volley of shots down in Bride’s. A perfect shot and he passed it up. When he had told his partner, Paul Culp, about passing up a clean shot on an elk, Culp had looked at him like he, too, thought Bartell had lost his marbles.

Bartell was dreaming about that passed shot one morning after working a routine night shift with Culp. Helen and Jess had just slammed the back door of the house on their usual breakfast battle, and he was trying to get his blood pressure back down within the confines of survivability.

Burnt Milk is a huge country, dropping away for miles around the Joseph River, and up at the top, near ten thousand feet, is where it all starts, with the three lakes, three glassy steps just down from the saddle. The geologic term for the three bodies of water is pater noster lakes. Our Father. The origin of the term resides in somebody’s observation that such lakes resemble the beads on a rosary. Pater noster lakes start when glaciers gouge the sides of mountains, then melt away and leave behind depressions, like footprints, which gather water. Graver, Tamarack, and Little Sleeping Child are all strung along the thin chain of Burnt Milk Creek, which joins the Joseph River miles below, out of sight.

It wasn’t any use. Bartell held his breath and tried to hear wind, but all he could hear was the echo of Helen and Jess snarling, like a pair of cats kicking at each other’s bellies.

Bartell tossed onto his side. He glanced at the clock and counted on his fingers. Four hours is not enough sleep. He was doomed to be exhausted for the rest of his life. He drug his legs over the edge of the bed, pulled on his robe, and padded down the carpeted stairs into the bright new room he and Helen added on a couple of years ago. He poured coffee, gathered up the remains of the newspaper, and went back upstairs and groaned his way into the reclining chair across the room from the bed.

Bartell liked the bedroom. When they bought the house, that room existed only as a bare, unheated attic, with a roughed-in floor. On impulse he decided they should turn that dead space into a bedroom, a bedroom with skylights. He began with the stairway, then he cut holes in the roof (Christ, you haven’t been nervous till you’ve chopped a hole in your goddamned roof) and installed two plastic skylights, which leaked. That first winter he and Helen slept under mounds of blankets, without insulation or heat, and in the morning the exposed points of the roofing nails over the bed would be covered with big globes of frost, like stars. It had reminded him of when he was a kid, wintering in all those line cabins with his old man, Cash Bartell, who was a wrangler and a drunk in the ranch country east of the mountains.

Bartell set his coffee on the floor, careful not to spill a drop, since Helen had a mother’s eagle eye for new stains. He folded the newspaper on his lap and reclined in the chair. It was snowing outside, huge wet flakes settling onto the dark boughs of the cedar near the window.

Bartell shut his eyes and listened to the silence.

That’s the goddamned trouble. You’re always coming home to a houseful of sleeping people, or waking up into a room where everybody’s just left. Then after a while you get used to the solitude, the peace and quiet of being alone, where nobody is drunk, where there aren’t impossible demands made by people who won’t remember the next day, when they sober up, what you told them. Or what they told you.

And then one day you realize that sometimes the people you love make you feel like you’re still at work. Because they aren’t perfect. Perfect like your solitude is perfect.

So it’s easy to give up on people, all of them, even yourself, strip them down in your mind and dump them in a padded cell. Sometimes Bartell wondered if that’s what went sour with Culp’s marriage. Who the hell knew? Among cops, a man’s private life is his own business, which was a pretty bizarre code when you considered that his professional life is community property, fair game to all in the form of gossip. Gossip and rumor. Rumor is the supreme distillate of gossip, gossip given life. Who’s being reassigned, who said what about whom. Who’s chippying on the job. It’s none of my business and I like the guy, but . . . and then the needle, jabbed into a man’s affairs like social acupuncture. Leave a secret alone and all it does is fester.

Bartell heard a scraping noise outside. He went to the other end of the room and leaned over the rumpled bed and looked out the window. Across the street a frail old man was already out shoveling snow from his sidewalk, even though there was barely enough snow to cover, and what snow there was seemed to melt on the leading edge of his shovel.

There you are, Ray, Bartell said to himself. The authentic and essential Ray Bartell. Living alone, renting out the basement room to help take up the slack in the pension, scraping away the sky’s residue from a slab of cement.

Bartell went back to the recliner and looked out at the cedar tree. Green. By the time he went to work later in the day, it would be dark again, the town vastly changed, as though night were a different locale, a land of infinitely moving shadows and color that somehow could be absorbed but not actually seen, a blue jungle.

But today the world is green. That’s the dominant color of Burnt Milk. Green, where the spike bull ran after Bartell let him go.

Bartell leaned back in the chair and shut his eyes. A moment later he kicked his heels against the rock and shifted his weight on his hips. Then he reached to his right and dragged the knapsack closer, wanting something to eat. As he reached, the wooden stocks of the revolver on his belt gouged his ribs. He straightened up and looked down at the gun, a reminder of his most surprising invention of all, Bartell the Policeman. Pretend you’re something long enough and it comes true. He changed his mind about eating. He looked behind him, where far off through the summer haze, Rozette unfolded like a map along the Holt River from the mouth of Bride’s Canyon.

Then he looked back into Burnt Milk, where there was no city, no story, where there was green, the green of a thousand million trees, and the brown of rocks and of late summer grass and hidden elk, and the smart blue and white of sky. And silver. The silver of lakes.

Chapter 1

The four of them were all members of Mitchell’s Maggots, and that night they were breaking one of Lieutenant Tobe Mitchell’s golden rules, which was that only two of Tobe’s cops should be at coffee at the same time in the same joint on the same side of the Holt River in the same city of Rozette, Montana. For dispatching purposes, Rozette is divided into two districts, North and South, and if you are assigned North and you are called out from coffee to handle a call, any call, and you happen to have been in a South restaurant, why, then it’s a regular screaming, code-three-red-lights-and-siren crisis. We’re talking serious.

Screw him, Ike Skinner said. Skinner was a big tall guy, a lank guy with buck teeth and heavy black glasses, the kind like Buddy Holly used to wear, only with a peeling Band-Aid over the bridge to keep his nose from getting raw. Ike always looked like a fellow who had just thought of something important, except that he never had. His brows grew in high, peaked Vs. The overall effect was of looking back at an amazed and intelligent cow.

You wait, said Collie Proell, who had once played backup defensive tackle for the Denver Broncos. Collie can carry a medium-sized cow elk by himself, and he’s cheaper to use than a horse, since he doesn’t need a saddle. But then a horse eats less, and he doesn’t tell all his drinking buddies where you hunt. The old fart’ll drive by and count all them police cars outside there and tomorrow we’ll be having a meeting and Tobe’ll step into the pulpit and away we go. Proell stopped talking to belch, then looked at Bartell. Right, Ray? He belched again.

Before Bartell could answer, Skinner said, Let him. He dumped a fourth teaspoon of sugar in his coffee and clanged his spoon against the inside of the mug. A guy in this department spends half his time walking around bent over anyhow. The brass always say we’re screwin’ ‘em, but it’s always me pulling up my drawers. Let him bitch. I wrote a traffic ticket tonight. Money ticket, too, speeding, not one of them phoney broken headlight warnings that don’t cost anything. Tobe wants to hard-ass me, I could give up arresting people altogether, and then . . . Skinner’s voice trailed off eloquently and he licked his spoon. Then where would this city be? On its knees, that’s where.

In the toilet, Proell agreed.

Yer goddamn rights, said Skinner.

In the weeks after the holiday rush of suicides, domestic disasters, last-minute armed robberies, and other demonstrations of holiday spirit and familial love, Rozette had gone dead. It was a cold night in January, so cold the snow squeaked under your boots and made the hair stand up on your neck and you could feel the ice crystallize inside your nose when you took a deep breath.

The four cops had been inside Roosa’s for about five minutes. It was just after midnight, and the place was empty, except for Bullah Watkins, the night cook, and a forty-year-old bum wearing a hardhat and at least three generations of bad luck. About ten seconds after the cops came in, the bum disappeared into the men’s can.

Roosa’s is a long, narrow tunnel of a place, lit by a hooded band of neon around the pressed-tin ceiling. The kitchen is blocked off by a long counter, which extends the length of the place, like a pier. Bullah fixes real food back there, the kind that comes off a griddle or out of deep fat. She uses the kind of oven that works with real heat instead of mysterious electronic tricks that make your pacemaker go tilt. Three booths squat like fat pink life rafts behind the kitchen. Culp and Bartell sat on the far side of the rear booth, with their back to a big white upright freezer. Proell and Skinner faced them across the table.

You guys done anything exciting tonight? Skinner was asking Bartell because he knew better than to ask Culp, knew Culp wouldn’t say anything, just nod his head yes or no, which doesn’t do squat to pep up the conversation.

Not so you could tell. Sometimes Bartell wasn’t much of a raconteur himself.

Culp slumped deeper in the corner and stared over Proell’s shoulder at the front door, not saying anything. Just watching the door, like he always did. By now Bartell knew Culp’s habits almost as well as he knew his own. By mutual agreement they were partnered on the three nights of the week that they shared. Their other two, each worked alone. The Culp-Bartell partnership had survived over three years, longer than most.

You? Bartell took a sip of water and looked over the rim of the glass at Proell and Skinner, who both worked alone all the time. He knew from the radio traffic that their night had been as slow as his and Culp’s.

Moved out of the house on the way to work, Skinner said.

Culp’s eyes shifted to Skinner, then settled back on the door.

Got me a room over the Cloverleaf. Rented it cheap off old Nails Hogan.

The Cloverleaf is an all-night cafe and card parlor right across the alley from the police station, which makes it a kind of transient barracks for divorcing cops. You can get a drink there until two a.m., and after that, you can get brains and eggs for breakfast, if you’ve got a sewer for a gut. Nails Hogan, the proprietor, will hear your confession until all hours, or give you last rites in the ultimate bind. Hogan’s flop used to be a whorehouse. That was back in the days when Rozette was a real busting-loose town, before World War II, when the population was over a hundred thousand, not the sixty or seventy thousand like today. All the mills and the railroad were going strong then, and there were plenty of whores, all of them being tamed in cribs over joints like the Cloverleaf. They say in the old days the cops would walk through the cribs and the gals would roll up twenty dollar bills, roll them real tight like a cigarette, then reach down to the end of a guy’s holster and stick that bill up the barrel of his gun: .38 caliber paydays, the old-timers called it.

I didn’t know you and your old lady were in a jam, Bartell said. Sorry. Bartell always had an attack of nerves whenever another cop got served for divorce.

Hell, son, don’t be sorry. Skinner slurped his coffee. My old lady, shit, she belongs in a kennel. We got no kids. I’m better off this way. Long as I don’t get scabies before I move out of Hogan’s. Gonna get me a place in that singles outfit up in Aztec Heights. The one where Thomas Cassidy lives. Cassidy, a detective, is the Department’s role model for single men. Cassidy is so good at being single, he’s trying it now for the fifth time.

Bartell glanced over at his partner. Reading Culp was like trying to understand a foreign language when you’ve never heard the accent. His sandy hair was always longer than regulation, but he hated guys with anything close to a hippie hairstyle. A brushy mustache fell like a dark glacier over his long upper lip, covering his mouth in such a way that his speech often seemed the product of ventriloquism. He had a long waist, powerful legs, and quick hands, like a wrestler. Getting a fix on Culp was made even harder by his eyes, which tended to wander in different directions, so you never knew if he was looking at you or around you, looking instead at some unspecified object of interest that has escaped your attention. After his divorce, Culp’s ex-wife took their two kids, boys, and moved to Kalispell, where she married some guy who worked at a radio station. Waiting for Culp to talk to somebody like Skinner about something like divorce was like putting a stopwatch on the second coming of Christ.

I tell you, Skinner went on, a couple of weeks ago, there was this headline in the paper. personality may cause cancer. So I read this, see, and I cut it out and show it to my ball and chain and I tell her she’s as good as dead.

You’re all class, Ike, Proell said, tugging at his mustache. Ain’t he got class?

Well, next thing I know she’s got a lock on the bedroom door and I’m eating all my meals in this dump.

Watch where you’re calling a dump! Bullah shouted from the kitchen.

It ain’t polite to eavesdrop. Skinner didn’t even bother to turn around and look at her.

You must have me confused with somebody, Bullah said.

Yeah, I better learn to be nice to women, I’m gonna be single. I’m sorry, Bullah. You look pretty good tonight. . . . What happened?

Bartell couldn’t help laughing at Skinner. He always laughed at Skinner, ever since he was hired. Bartell could hardly believe it had been six years now since he’d walked into a bar for the first time wearing black leather and a gun, so long now he could barely remember that special sense of apartness you feel. Now, on those rare occasions when he went in a bar in civilian clothes, he felt naked. Six years of paychecks and contract fights with the city, threatened layoffs, cutbacks, grumbling about new police cars that are too slow and don’t fit your body right, dirty police cars, drunks who puke in the back seat of your police car, cops who forget to put gas in your police car when they get off shift, dogs that piss on the seat of your police car and then eat your lunch. Squeaks and rattles. Film on the inside of the windows from cops who smoke tobacco, and spit streaked down the doors from those who chew it. Police cars were almost like home now, a flophouse where too many men have sat in the same chair and left behind peanut shells that stick to your hundred-dollar wool pants that have to be dry-cleaned, for Chrissake.

What’s so goddamned funny? Skinner always sounded like he wanted to barbecue your knuckles for lunch.

Cops. Bartell felt Culp look over at him.

What’s so goddamn funny about cops? Proell sounded almost as highly evolved as Skinner.

I just like cops.

You’re sicker than the rest of us, Skinner said. There ain’t nothing about this job worth a shit. You know that?

Proell nodded and daubed a damp napkin at a spot on his shirt.

That’s right. You know, I been doing some thinking. Skinner was a great one for thinking. "I watched this thing on TV the other night called Shogun. All about Japs. Samurai. With them big-assed swords, you know? Whap! Some asshole’s an obituary just because you don’t like the way he says he’s sorry for using up your oxygen."

Yeah, I think I heard about that, Proell said.

Damn rights. Whap! Skinner chopped the edge of his hand against the table, slopping coffee from all four cups. Cut their necks right down to a goddamn stub. I tell you, I got a lot of choice insights into police work from that show.

Everybody except Culp laughed and Bullah wandered back with a rag and a coffeepot and repaired the damage. Bullah looked like she’d been fifty years old forever. Twice a year she gets a new pair of white canvas sneakers from K-Mart because the heels wear down and her feet begin to spill over as she walks, mile after mile, a continent crossed within the one-hundred-foot channel from the front to the back of that restaurant, coffeepot a part of her hand, like a mechanic’s wrench, an old, unskilled mechanic who can fix your car just by talking to it right.

Samurai shit would make my divorce a lot simpler, too, Skinner said. Whap! He flooded the table again with coffee. Make your old lady’s head community property.

I know you guys are on vacation. This time Bullah tossed a rag in front of Skinner for him to clean up his own mess. But I was wondering if you could fit it into your schedule to kindly remove that guy from my rest room and my restaurant.

What guy? Proell perked up. He wasn’t the kind to make his decline into work any easier than he had to, but removing people wasn’t work. It was recreation.

The guy in the men’s room. I think he’s homesteading in there.

Proell and Skinner glanced at each other, like coaches exchanging signals, then slid out from their side of the booth. Culp and Bartell followed them to the men’s room, which was next to the back door, no more than half a dozen steps from their booth.

The door was unlocked and when Skinner pushed it open, Bartell saw the end of the bum’s brown sleeping bag under the urinal. Proell reached around Skinner, took the bag in both hands and dragged the bag and its occupant outside. The hardhat clattered along behind, tied by a string to the head of the bag.

Pull your hands out where I can see them, Paul Culp said.

What the hell you want? The bum’s voice sounded like a rockslide. Half his face showed above the bag, like one of those old drawings of Kilroy.

Get them hands out! Culp said.

There was movement inside the bag and in a moment the bum’s hands inched up beside his stubbled face, his gray eyes and short, pancaked nose.

What’s your name? Culp said. You got any ID?

George A. Rather. Got a card in my pocket.

Get it, Culp ordered. Don’t bring out anything but that card.

"You wanna know what the A stands for?" Rather asked.

"Save your breath. It stands for Asshole," Proell said. He shared Ike Skinner’s knack for philosophical observations.

The four cops stood around George Rather like a cut-rate crew of pallbearers as he fished for the card. Then he handed it out to Culp and Culp handed it to Bartell. It was a gold-colored card from the local food-stamp office. Bartell went to the phone up front by the cash register to check Rather for any outstanding warrants, using the name and Social Security number on the card, as well as the birthday that Rather had graciously supplied. Nobody wanted George A. Rather, not even to send him to jail, and when Bartell got back, Rather had the bedroll slung over his shoulder and his hardhat on his head.

Too fucking cold out there, Rather was saying.